colemak

Way back in--idk--probably 2019 or maybe even 2018 I decided I should learn a second keyboard layout as an enrichment activity. Dvorak was out the window becaus my brother uses it (& it has fewer shared keys with qwerty--a shortcut consideration),^[1] so I chose to learn colemak instead. At the time, I was working a job where I was the Only IT, so--my house my rules--I installed colemak as a language on my PC and got to work, swapping between them to practice. When I built a keyboard for home running qmk firmware, I made a toggleable layer to swap layouts[^2].

As an exercise, it was Good Fun. I started the same way I started with qwerty: classic typist lessons, going one finger and row at a time, adding fingers and rows 'till you can slowly do some words then all words before going for speed. It wasn't Exactly The Same since as a kid I literally went off a binder-style workbook my mom used when she learned typing in the early 80s^[2], but it was close, which was important to me. Once I got to a non-tear-inducing speed, I quickly got competent with it! Not really close to my breezy 80-90wpm I can manage in qwerty, but a respectable 60. Then I changed jobs, and my current job made it feel like way too much effort to install colemak as a second language to use across a much much larger & sometimes bizarre environment. It's probably been 3 years since I was using it in earnest--or really, at all.

But last week I got a wireless keyboard like I threatened in [/okay uhh that part was easy ii]. Colemak is back, locked within the keyboard firmware not the OS! Muscle memory is long, it's like I never got off the bike--there's a little rust with a fistful of keys I consistently use wrong, but I'm still above 50 and sitting at a nice 94% accuracy, which I think is the slowest I would tolerate typing--any slower and I'm going slower than thought by enough it's a chore. I've been playing with my website using my new toy and typed this whole post in colemak. It's good to have it back!

I don't think colemak is massively better than qwerty. I don't think I'm any more ergonomic or efficient. But I am enriched, which is Very Important. [insert Big-Walk-Creature-typing.gif here]

[^2:] which I probably use less than I could, since I'm bad at remembering to leave the layer when I'm done and then it confuses the rest of the house the next time they try logging in and the password is wrong